Arts & Culture
Gig Monkey reviews Moogieman - Girls and Film

It is always great to go into a new release review with no idea what you are going to be listening to, and any release or show from Oxford auteur Moogieman is going to be a little unexpected, no matter what you were expecting.

He is an artist that seems to not have that control point between his brain and the rest of the world – this debut album, as with his earlier EP releases, is very much a stream of consciousness production, (the fact that there are 24 tracks on this record a good indicator of the reluctance to edit) and it veers wildly and with reckless abandon across genres, eras and dimensions.

The result of this cartwheeling, scattergun approach is a messy, childish, wobbly and quite glorious collection of short songs themed around photography and film and built around some clever, witty and considered lyrics. Musically it is all very lo-fi with a real bedroom synth vibe about it, although the production is spot on and unobtrusive. The music is also very clever, creepy and unsettling one minute, bouncy and sparkling another and full of interesting and exciting sounds that just appear from nowhere, mid song.

Stand out track, from many contenders, would perhaps be the post-punk, swaggering synth-pop of “I Left My Camera On The Moon” a poignant song written from the point of view of Eugene Cernan, the Apollo 17 Astronaut who left his camera behind on the lunar surface, hoping it would be retrieved by a later mission – a mission which never came.

It is the sign of a good, healthy and artistically nourishing music scene that an artist like Moogieman can not only be birthed but can flourish, a counterpoint to the proliferation of mediocre, middle of the ground blandness. So put away your genericly sterile music, pick up a copy of this and enjoy the creativity.